July 2007

30 July 2007

This weekend we finally, after months of mucking with it, launched Cooperation Commons' new site. Previously we had built the site on Plone which has a poor security model and blogging tools. This meant that we spent a lot (and by a lot I don't mean a little), time fighting spammers and other malevolent entities.

Now we've moved to Drupal which has a better security model and is purported to be more stable. However, Drupal was annoying for an all-volunteer army to subdue. We went through several Drupal jockeys in getting the site fixed up.

I am grateful that Howard Rheingold didn't fly to Seattle and throttle me during the process. I am happy that I had Paul Hartzog to suffer along with. And I'm knee-shakingly humbled by the heroic efforts of James Day, Brian Kerrand Hellekin Wolf for beating Drupal into submission.

When I was a growth management planner in Portland, Oregon, my major job was to reconcile people's mobility needs with their livability needs. You see, if we did our jobs right, the neighborhoods would become denser, the amenities would become more numerous, costs of goods and services would be cheaper. People would want to walk around, eat at a nearby restaurant, grab groceries on the way home.

Well ... it worked. Neighborhoods in Portland, Oregon, are likely the nicest collection of neighborhoods you'll find in North America.

But what also happened is people want to go everywhere in town and see everything. So we made the city bicycle oriented, pedestrian friendly and transit supportive. We actually started to use congestion as a means to slow and regulate traffic.

In other words, rather than trying to build roads in order to arrive at zero congestion (an impossibility) - we used it as a tool in an overall network.

It was a network of living that supported a healthy and sustainable future. In gross terms, this is how I see all this falling together in my three-C's:

Connectivity:

Walkable neighborhoods

Transit coverage (distance and frequency)

Designated bikeways

Coherent Arterial Network

Few Freeways

Wayfinding Tools

Carsharing Services

Commerce:

Restaurants

Grocery Stores

Entertainment

Retail Space

Commercial Space

Banks and Other Financial

Comfort:

Schools

Parks

Trees

Government Services

Delivery Services

Healthcare (Private)

Healthcare (Public)

Police / Fire

So, assuming that this is a comprehensive list of network elements, why does traffic get so much of our attention? I think it's because we never see ourselves as "traffic", we see ourselves "caught in traffic". Traffic is the other cars in our way and not us in other people's way.

A Digression / Illustration

In Seattle, we have sections of freeways that have actually seen a decrease in traffic per day, but an increase in hours of congestion.

How perplexing!

It's my personal belief that this is due to the increase in aggressive driving and decrease in what is known as "gap tolerance". Gap tolerance is the distance you leave between your car and the car in front of you. As gap tolerance decreases, congestion increases.

If all cars go exactly the same speed things are fine. Cars obviously do not go the same speed. So if you have five cars all very close to each other and the lead car decreases its speed by only 1 mile an hour, the second car will need to decrease 2 miles per hour in order to avoid hitting it (unless it decreases speed magically at exactly the same time). The third car now has to decrease its speed and so forth through the chain.

If we started at 50 we have this 2 mph backward progression:

Car 1 - 49

Car 2 - 47

Car 3 - 45

Car 4 - 43

Car 5 - 42

Now car 5 is going nearly 10 Miles an hour slower than the first car. Behind car 5, maybe there are two other clusters of five cars.

Soon, you get everyone on the freeway going 20 mph, simply due to a normal fluctuation of the lead car.

What happens if you are car 11 in this progression? You say "Why the hell are we slowing down?!"

But the fact is, you are slowing down because YOU are traffic. It's hard to accept blame for being in the middle of a series you can see neither the end or beginning of. But you are actually the body, the heart, of this monster.

This continues when you get off the freeway and are now late and race through someone's neighborhood to make your appointment.

That guy you see flying down the street in front of your house and think, "God! Slow down buddy!" is actually just another incarnation of you (or me), typical American.

Return to Topic

The popularity of the discussion and over-emphasis on traffic in our overall livability leads inevitably to the misinterpretation of transportation amenities. The suburbs look better because the streets are wider, the stop signs fewer, and apparent traffic - less. The thought being that the ability to drive 40 mph through suburban neighborhoods to get home (quickly?) will make life more livable.

The fact that we can no longer walk anywhere whatsoever is sublimated by the orgasmic internal view of driving unhindered for blocks on end.

We weren't able to solve this dilemma in Portland. I think in the end, only the total depletion of fossil fuels will finally solve it. One nice thing though, there's been a noticeable shift toward living in places where there is walkability and amenities.

26 July 2007

Walkscore is a site that uses some simple techniques to figure out how walkable your neighborhood is. They use a few elements like access to amenities and roadway connectivity to tell you how easy it is to live life and still be able to use your legs.

Here we see the major elements of Walkscore - the rank, the map, the placement of amenities, and the lists of those amenities (the seconds, e.g. Grocery Stores, unfold to show all of them). The ranking from 0 to 100 shows how pedestrian friendly your neighborhood is. NW Portland is extremely walkable and is loaded with amenities, so I thought it would be a good example.

To contrast, here is my childhood home in Grand Island, Nebraska:

We see here that my place Grand Island ranks a paltry, depressing 17. But wait, let's take something a little different and see how Walkscore settles up.

The map below is of Compton, California. Compton was rated the most dangerous city in America in 2006. It has a fairly impressive walk score of 63.

So, in Grand Island you might need to walk a little further to get something, but your worst outcome might be a mosquito bite. Compton has a much higher walk score, but that doesn't mean you want to walk around there.

Now, further, my neighborhood in Seattle gets an 82. But the streets here go basically straight up. I know if my father were generating a Walkscore out of his own needs, he'd give Grand Island a much higher rating.

I love the academic exercise in Walkscore. I also love the promise of being able to analyze neighborhoods for how inherently livable they are - as opposed to merely how deceivingly cheap the land is.

Walkscore has a ways to go before it's really complete. A complete analysis like this will include things like:

Topography

Average speeds on roadways

locations of pedestrian crossings

average daily traffic on the roadways

existence of on-street parking

traffic calming measures

whether the amenities being walked to are on the street or behind a sea of parking

trees

parks

specific ped-friendly points (benches, coffee shops, places to rest)

weather

pedestrian barriers (freeways, dangerous places, etc.)

Having said all this, Walkscore is already an excellent tool to demonstrate the hidden costs of living in the suburbs. One is fairly required to drive everywhere. Even in enlightened Washington State, we have our mindless sprawl.

Here we have a confluence of inconvenient living, no transit, streets without connectivity, very steep topography, the streets have average speeds of 40 miles per hour, and no amenity whatsoever within a half mile. And you notice it gets worse as you go west. (If you think I'm being unfair, I could have picked many many cases worse than this.)

Looking at this on a map and seeing the distance one must traverse to get to anything will hopefully help people consider distance when choosing where to live.

So, keep it up Walkscore people! This has some serious promise to save Americans from themselves.

17 July 2007

The Compete blog has some interesting little maps showing who clicked where to get to Republican candidate web sites.

I love the use of simple GIS to show the relative weightings of what candidates took which states. One thing that really amuses me here is my home state of Nebraska (population 1,768,331) versus South Dakota (population (781,919). With over twice the population, South Dakotans sure seem to kick some Nebraska butt for web usage.

But I also like the Nebraska spread and the apparent and decisive McCain support there.

This is all pretty interesting, but it doesn't actually look at the construction of the various web sites or discuss how the campaigns incorporate the web site into their campaigning.

The McCain people in Nebraska may just be much better at sending people to the McCain site or, even more funny, may log into their part of the site through the home page. So at the end of every campaign day, you might get more McCain hits from campaign workers and not actual swayable voters.

Nice maps, interesting use of GIS, spurious statistics. But take a look at the maps!

In the end, the real value of friends, networks and personal relationships is how they make you feel.

So I'm in the middle of getting ready for a bunch of business trips, the office has several hard deadlines, and suddenly we're being randomly audited by WA State Labor and Industries (who seeded that random number generator?). I'm a bit harried.

When you are harried, you get support from your friends. Usually this is in some intangible way. Or just by saying something silly.

Over the last few weeks, I've been plodding along with my Facebook page because it's what I do.

This morning, though, Brian Kerr in Michigan gave me a needed laugh when he made me an officer of his City-wiki group with the following title:

14 July 2007

So we all know that I joined Walker Tracker a little over two months ago. It's largely been a positive experience. I feel better, I know I'm moving around more, and I have ... proof of it.

One of the big problems with general exercise is you have few ways to answer questions like:

Am I doing better?

Are my goals realistic?

What is actually impacting my goals?

These questions have two guideposts ... you v. you and you v. others. Walker Tracker helps with all these.

Jim Against Jim Smackdown!

First we'll look at me v. me.

Here I am over the last 40 days. We can pretty much pick out days where I was flying or sitting in a car by the dips. But at the end of last month (days 22 thu 26) I just totally felt sluggish and sat around.

My monthly walking goal is an average of 10,000 steps per day - about 5.6 miles or 9 kilometers. I usually try to push that up 6 miles or 9.5 km. Anyway, we can see a sudden rise and plateau during the last two weeks at about 11,000 steps per day.

Why?

Because of this:

Walker Tracker let's me know my overall highs and lows for my history, but check out my average last month.

Yes, 8.943 - largely due to the massively irregular amount I was walking every day and my fit of laziness at the end of the month.

So this month I redoubled my efforts to maintain a consistent regimen.

Now, consider this, what I now consider days of extreme laziness I used to call

"days". The existence of the rolling metric changed my perception of what makes a successful day.

So, in Jim v. Jim, Jim suddenly has to keep up with his own expectations - and knows full well when he does it.

In addition, I'm slowly covering the world with walking paths in my walking map. Zoom in on a given point to see my walks through several cities over the last two months. Wow, 11 cities and 5 states in two months!

Jim Against the World!

This is all well and good, but these stats are cold and lifeless. They are Jim in a void. No friends, no walking comrades. One shudders to contemplate the ambling isolation.

But Jim does have Comrades. One of which, Heather, is a pedo-maniac and nearly impossible to keep up with. So we know, overall how we stand, but that's not the whole story. So let's select a few near me and see how things are on a daily basis.

Here we can tell some stories. Everyone has good days and bad. Prentiss Riddle who is 4th on the list, also (at the end there) the one with the record number of steps (over 22,000) in one day of hiking around Spain. Brian Kerr has a day that beat all of mine.

What I get from this is that my routine will get me my goal, but I'm having very few (none in this instance) breakout days. We saw above, my highest step day, ever, was a little over 16,000, well below Mr. Riddle's effort.

Now, if I were to add Heather back here, we'd all look like sloths. So what I have here are peers in my walking / jogging weight class.

Community in Walker Tracker

The "usual" community is certainly present in Walker Tracker. I'm pleased to see the number of comments my step blog actually gets. Beyond that, people discuss technique, proper shoes, the lifespan of shoes, how to tell if your shoes are worn out (mine were), motivation, and so forth.

Communities seem to form around almost anything now. It seems expected and almost effortless. Support can come from almost anywhere at any time. And, at least in this instance, it's made me healthy.

13 July 2007

We've had a few projects now where the clients are thrilled with the promise of our agile management practices. They assign people to work with us, participate in the wikis, and participate in scrums. They benefit from constant integration, good source control, and non-ownership of documents and code. They love constant change and the tailoring of software as it's being created.

But a funny thing happens. The more they get into it, the more they want to work in-house on some components. This is great!

In-house, however, means that they want to use their processes - which are not transparent to us. So they see everything we see on our end, but we don't see into their organization.

Then things start to break down. The excitement of individuals on their team leads to internally assigned code - which means that code is owned. Their corporate rules mean that they use their own code repositories that are not constantly integrated.

There seems to be a dynamic here where they understand Agile as a means of managing outside teams, but not internal teams.

Has anyone out there experienced this as well? Bill Anderson? David Anderson? I don't have a ready solution for it - redesigning the internal processes of my clients seems a bit beyond my reach. But I would never stifle their enthusiasm or desire to add to the project.

08 July 2007

Buying health care is the single most difficult thing a small business owner will ever do.

Small business owners are chasing dreams, implementing plans, negotiating deals, and making things work - then along comes the US Health Care system. Suddenly, you have to be an expert of medicine.

For us, our goal was to get the best plan possible for the least cost. Sound like a simple directive? Well, we may as well have been trying to cure and treat disease ourselves.

For us, the best plan means simply this: the plan that will provide the best medical care for those working at Gray Hill Solutions.

The first thing we learned is that most people approach it the other way around, they want the cheapest plan that will provide the best care. In other words, their goals are to get the least-cost plan that still manages to provide some benefits.

After six years in operation, we've found our priorities to be the correct ones. Friends and acquaintances who have inverted their priorities ended up spending more and having more headaches.

So, here's what we've found:

1. Find the right broker

It's a bad time to be a broker. Brokers operate on a very very thin margin. They are squeezed from both sides constantly. When you first engage a broker make sure they know what your priorities are. Then, every time they bring you a plan, make them show you how it fits your priorities and always ask if there's a better plan.

Since brokers operate on a razor thin margin, they are more likely to try to sell you plans that pay higher margins. The plans / providers that pay higher are generally the ones that have less benefits or provide substandard customer service or commit multiple sins listed below.

2. Talk to people in health care

The best people to get advice from are the ones that actually have to bill insurance companies. We have the blessing of having my wife around, who has given us hours of advice. Since she is a Speech Pathologist and a sole practitioner, she has to bill insurance companies every day. She knows which ones pay, which don't, which have hidden fees, and so on. People in health care are on the front lines.

3. Insurance Companies Play Rough

Insurance companies want to make money. Surprise! There are some things in health care that are very expensive. Other things are not. Unfortunately, the expensive things are precisely what you need the insurance for the most. And ... they're the things the insurance companies want to avoid.

So, they shell-game it. They will provide a range of plans, each with 90% good stuff and 10% gotchas, and they'll rotate the gotchas around the various plans. Here's some of the most nasty, unconscionable gotchas we've seen:

Rehab / Physical Therapy

One favorite is to low-ball Physical Therapy (in-patient, out-patient or both). Like 8 hours total for the year type low-balling. And this was from a major provider. It is highly unlikely that anyone requiring PT would ever need 8 hours or less. If you need it, you need it for a reason.

Childhood Illnesses / Developmental Issues

An easy one to bury is kids. Grown-ups buy health insurance and they are scared about their own aging and mortality. We down play the cost of childhood health care because most people have a fairly idealized view of the costs of being a sick kid - we didn't actually pay the bills. Many companies we know end up saying "I can't believe I forgot to insure children!"

Many plans we looked at didn't cover developmental issues like autism at all. It doesn't help that the insurance companies themselves are fighting to have many developmental disorders like autism classified as a mental issue (therefore not covered in most health plans) or an educational issue (meaning the school system needs to cover 100% of the cost).

In-facility care

Some insurance plans we looked at covered only a few days of in-patient care, while covering large percentages of major illnesses. So they've cover the whole liver transplant, but send you home the next day.

Deductibles

We have always had low deductibles. We never want our staff to worry about out-of-pocket costs when dealing with a medical emergency. Recently my wife saw a plan with a $10,000 deductible!

4. Give Me PPO or Give Me Death

Preferred Provider plans (PPOs) are far preferable to managed plans (HMOs, etc), because of the flexibility they provide to the insured. PPOs tend to have better benefits, require less management on the employer's part, and tend to pay with less hassle to the employee.

However, all PPOs are not created equal. PPOs have in-network and out-of-network providers. Some PPO plans make the out of network costs so freakishly high that you may as well just stay in-network. They can do this with either higher deductibles or lower maximum payouts.

5. Claiming to Pay Claims

Many insurance companies get by on a pseudo-Ponzi scheme where, in order to get high returns for their investors, they will tell you a procedure is covered but when the procedure is done they don't pay. (This industry is also litigation happy, so I can't name names). What this means is that you may find that after a major surgery, you suddenly have to shell out for the balance. You could roll out of the operating room and find yourself as good as uninsured.

5a. Giving You the Run Around

This is a little harder now that billing is electronic and they can't lose the primary bill, but what some companies will do now is not pay a bill because they need more "documentation" either from the provider or from the insured. That is faxed in, generally, and suspiciously often - lost. Then, a few weeks later, someone needs to send them in again.

6. Obfuscation of Benefits

To further confuse people, insurance companies send you a statement called an "explanation of benefits" after a procedure. Good insurance companies will send an understandable one. When I was working for a dot com in the late nineties we received an "explanation of benefits" that was so confusing neither I, my wife, nor my HR department could make heads or tails of it.

The problem is, somewhere in there, was an indication that I had to send someone money. If I didn't, I got in trouble and my credit rating suffered. But I couldn't even figure out how much to pay.

7. Misleading Drug Plans

Holy moly! We saw one plan that had a multi-tiered drug plan. It was sold to us as 'great'. It had three tiers. Tier one - $15, Tier two - $20 and Tier three - $50.

For my asthma, I take a small handful of things. So I thought I'd run them through the plan. For my three drugs, I'd pay ... $150 a month. One of them was Albuterol, one of the most widely sold and popular drugs on the market.

So popular is Albuterol that my previous non-tiered plan with a flat $15 rate charged me only $6 for it.

But in this tiered plan, it was $50. Why? Because only generics were in the tier one plan. I have no idea what was in tier two.

Conclusion

We have a fantastic plan now that is about $250 per person, per month. We have a $200 deductible across the board, a $15 co-pay, an annual stop-loss of $5,000 per family and a $15 drug co-pay. We have ample benefits for the areas we described above. Recently, when a new generic of something I was taking came on the market, my health plan gave it to me for free.

We have vision, dental, massages, and extra coverage for physical therapy.

We have never had a problem getting providers paid or getting good service.

We have seen less expensive plans, but we figure that the marginal additional cost is far exceeded by the utter non-issue that health care is for us and our staff.

Even if you hire a company to do your benefits consulting, you need to watch for these issues. Ultimately you as a business owner need to decide whether you'd like to save money in the long run or in the short term.

My advice: Keep people healthy and happy. Cutting costs here will hurt you sooner or later.

One trend that bloggers don’t want to talk about? A number of my blogging friends have seen their traffic go down lately. They assume that their readers are off in social networks. I think they are absolutely right.

For once I disagree with Robert. I DO want to talk about it. Because I actually concur with Robert's thesis. And I am utterly delighted to do so.

In the past, say, from the late 'nineties until the last six-twelve months or so, Bloggers' readership grew IN PROPORTION to the social networks that were built up around them. Hence the phenomenon of the "A-List".

But if we're honest, looking back, it was always these circumventing social networks that were the really interesting part of the equation. The actual blogger in question, less so. Even if in our celebrity-worshiping culture, we sometimes forgot that.

Then suddenly, along comes stuff like Twitter and Facebook... et Voila! Suddenly, social networks start being successfully created without the "A-Listers" having to act like "Hubs" [or "Human Social Objects", if you want to get REALLY technical]. Suddenly, the need for A-listers to arbitrate "Who the Cool Kids are" [and who they aren't] is rapidly and thankfully diminished.

But in a comment to that post Scoble responds:

death to the a list? Well in two weeks I have gotten 2000 friends on facebook and 600 on pownce.

In the first place, after several years of blogging and having web sites before that and zines before that, I can tell you one thing.

People go outside during the summer

Readership goes down, TV viewership goes down, people go to the beach, they go to baseball games, they exercise.

Every summer my readership has lagged since 1982 when I started my first zine. So get over your own bad selves, it's summer! Go get a chocolate malt and set on the steps!

Beyond that, A listers are nodes in a network. Even if I consciously discriminate against an A lister in my direct network, someone within my network inevitably will not. Therefore, even filtered, their influence will be felt by me. So fear not the A lister, for it is that A lister that links your network to all the other networks and gives you something to filter in the first place.

A listers are hubs, but not filters. Your network is the filter. A listers like Arrington are your big end of the funnel. And I'm sure both Michael and Robert would agree.

02 July 2007

But Apparently not. To the right is, apparently, the Lenovo Thinkpad Reserve. A mindless, insipid product that is only equaled by its mindless, insipid web site. In fact, the reason I am showing the Engadget photo is ... I went searching for proof that this wasn't a joke.

You have to go to the site and listen to the introduction and the product description. It is pointless marketing drivel for a pointless product from one end to the other. I'm still fully expecting to find that this is a joke.

If it's not, the thing is by invitation only, so you can't have one. However, if you see one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I believe he'll have one.

It's a laptop with a leather case. The video says "It just makes sense." Yes, if making sense is encasing in leather something you are constantly fighting to keep cool.